SevOne

OVERVIEW

SevOne provides the world’s largest CSPs, MSPs and Enterprises with the most comprehensive technology portfolio to collect, analyze and visualize network & infrastructure performance data to deliver actionable insights to compete and win in the connected world.

SevOne provides the only network monitoring platform, engineered for Speed at Scale. The patented SevOne Cluster architecture leverages distributed computing to scale infinitely and collect millions of objects to provide real-time reporting down to the second and help organizations prevent outages.

Solutions

Performance Appliance Solution

The Internet of Things (IoT) presents a promising opportunity for enterprises and service providers to address the pressures of today’s competitive environment. Collecting and analyzing IoT data – in context – can provide insight that aids in both top-and bottom-line decision making. It can also help predict and re-shape your business. Unfortunately, with this comes hyper scale-based infrastructures which are creating a tidal wave of data and information to be monitored and analyzed.

SevOne’s Performance Appliance Solution(PAS) is today’s fastest, most scalable and most comprehensive data collection, monitoring, reporting and analysis solution. Each appliance is capable of monitoring performance metrics—scaling to support billions of monitored objects as part of a SevOne Cluster. The Performance Appliance Solution (PAS) collects, normalize, and analyze your infrastructure performance data no matter the source. It automatically baselines and trends every performance metric collected to distinguish between normal and abnormal behaviour and alert you (or multiple teams) about any possible incoming issues. With data collection down to 1 second, and a year's worth of raw data, you'll be able to expose hidden issues, plan for future capacity, and quickly gain insights into your entire infrastructure, no matter the size. The SevOne PAS will optimize your operational workflows, by combining metrics, flows, logs and end user experience in a single pane of glass.

Performance Log Appliance Solution

With ever-increasing amounts of log file data to monitor and analyze, today’s enterprises and service providers need a solution that offer true Speed at Scale. With SevOne, you can move beyond traditional log search, into real-time troubleshooting of log data at scale. The SevOne Performance Log Appliance (PLA) helps achieve this goal by offering fully distributed real-time analytics of terabytes worth of daily log data.

With today’s complex infrastructures and the rapidly growing number of connected devices, enterprises and service providers find it more and more difficulty to quickly and easily spot bandwidth hogs and wasteful traffic. By providing real time flow analysis, Dedicated NetFlow Collector (DNC), part of the SevOne Digital Infrastructure Management Platform, provides insight into how specific applications are using your network. This information is critical when it comes to prioritizing traffic and creating policies that help eliminate waste.

SevOne’s Dedicated NetFlow Collector (DNC) collects application flows from any source, Cisco, Juniper, Alcatel-Lucent, Citrix NetScaler and more. With the DNC flow analytics, you can monitor the traffic on your most critical links to easily spot rogue applications, bandwidth hogs, congestion, while understanding how applications are behaving on the infrastructure. Full Metric-to Flow integration with the SevOne Platform allows you to build deep dashboards for operations, planning and troubleshooting workflows. With industry-leading collection and retention granularity, you'll be able to expose hidden issues and quickly gain insights into your entire infrastructure, no matter the size.

SevOne Data Platform

The SevOne Data Platform includes the first of several new and highly anticipated, modular offerings – SevOne Data Engine, SevOne Data Insight and SevOne Data Bus. With these innovative modules, SevOne delivers the industry’s most comprehensive, scalable and cloud-native network and infrastructure management platform. It removes barriers for innovative businesses seeking to transition to today’s virtualized networks and cloud services.

SevOne Data Engine builds on SevOne’s proven ability to collect “all the data” at carrier and web scale to meet the needs of the world’s largest networks and datacenters. It transforms multivendor machine data into actionable, real-time insights to meet the agility, reliability, and business efficiency needs of large enterprises, CSPs and MSPs.

SevOne Data Insight transforms physical and virtual operations management environments through customizable visualizations and flexible, shareable workflows that deliver the right insight to the right person, at the right time.

SevOne Data Bus enables customers to connect their network and infrastructure data to external data lakes, BI packages, and automation controllers through real-time streams, extending the value of their data beyond that of the traditional operational silos.

Whitepapers

Energy Management for Data Centers

Introduction

A large consumer electronics technology company sought out SevOne for granular infrastructure visibility at worldwide scale to address their growing data center energy and operational efficiency needs.

The Data Center Energy Efficiency Problem

Data centers have challenges apart from specific individual business challenges. There exists a vicious circle between compute capability, power consumption and cooling. Growing businesses are under constant pressure to add data center compute capacity (or open a new data center). Each unit of added compute capacity increases power consumption which creates thermal load, necessitating more cooling which again adds to power consumption. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories has shown that the compute function of the data center accounts for 51% of power consumption and HVAC (cooling) accounts for 34%, with lighting and other functions consuming the remainder. Therefore 85% of the energy usage in an average data center is subject to regular growth and in need of efficiency measures. In small installations or for small businesses, this growth may be tenable, but for growing companies and at large scale across multiple data centers, the expense and complexity of data center infrastructure management has led to a strong need to drive energy and operational efficiency to keep the vicious circle in check.

Business Challenge

In this use case, the company faced this data center energy efficiency challenge with the extenuating circumstances of rapid growth in computing needs and a corporate desire to use renewable “green” sources of energy, which come at a premium cost to traditional energy. With over 600,000 servers and 25,000 smart power strips and power distribution units across multiple datacenters, the company had limited insight into:

Compute power consumption

Opportunities for server virtualization and server consolidation to reduce power consumption and cooling

Potential operation efficiencies through better utilization of available server resources

To gain the next level of insight into their infrastructure performance, the company turned to SevOne to implement monitoring, baselining and alerting for power consumption across their world-wide data centers.

Why SevOne?

SevOne was chosen for this company’s key long-term infrastructure initiative based on SevOne’s ability to monitor all types of infrastructure at near real-time with highly granular visibility combined with the scale to collect energy efficiency data from over 25,000 smart meters without loss of monitoring or reporting performance. SevOne extends to any infrastructure with the capability to integrate and correlate any time series data with any other performance monitoring data with automatic baselining, thresholding and alerting capabilities. As a relevant example, SevOne can combine and correlate data center temperature data with power consumption.

Business Results and Benefits

The first step in the plan to increase data center efficiency through infrastructure performance monitoring enabled the company to more accurately forecast data center needs and reign in unnecessary expansion. Just as classic network performance management enables IT administrators to forecast bandwidth capacity requirements, the infrastructure performance monitoring supplied by SevOne enabled the company to baseline power and cooling consumption alongside server usage to forecast future data center needs. SevOne’s automated baselining helped the company understand normal power consumption and ferret-out unusual conditions, even across the immense scale of the data centers. The company has postponed or cancelled several data center developments and envisions a 10-40% power savings as a result of understanding power consumption at the rack level.

These results, however, are really only the “low hanging fruit” of the power strip-based infrastructure monitoring program. The baseline and regular power performance data are being combined with IPMI data (CPU, Fans, etc.) collected by SevOne, to provide a more complete picture of power usage at the server level. This level of data will enable the company to improve efficiencies in a number of important ways:

Drive server providers to deliver improved power consumption

Engage vendors on new models of service

Develop compute efficiencies by server type and utilization

Plan for peak power utilization and adjust operations accordingly

Shift resource usage based on known use profiles

Potential for Expansion

The many remaining options listed are, themselves, just the beginning of the possibilities that the company can develop using SevOne to monitor data center infrastructure. The addition of new metrics and the potential for script-driven automation based on alerts and usage patterns supports ever increasing refinements in operations and improvements in efficiency:

Monitor data center temperatures and humidity by aisle or area enabling most efficient resource use based on cooling requirements

Monitor external weather and correlate to power usage to avoid spikes in power usage or unnecessary cooling

Use alerts and script controls to limit power consumption to avoid running resources at or near capacity

Monitor HVAC performance directly to drive efficiency

Summary

The seemingly small-scale effects of server power consumption become massive expenses at scale and require innovative infrastructure management to drive energy and operational efficiency. SevOne’s unique ability to monitor all types of infrastructure at near real time with highly granular visibility, and the capability to scale without loss of monitoring or reporting performance has enabled a large consumer electronics technology company to monitor and forecast power consumption and cooling in their data centers, driving energy and operational efficiencies. SevOne sees the future as the need to manage infrastructure, not just networks and is partnering with visionary companies to create a vibrant communications infrastructure.

Alere Medical Gains Holistic View of its Infrastructure with SevOne

Needed a way to forward-project capacity management capabilities that reported into its existing management interface

New acquisitions required bringing together disparate entities

Existing network monitoring system lacked fundamental capabilities necessary for implementing the system

Alere Medical (formerly Matria Healthcare) is a leading provider of integrated comprehensive health enhancement programs to health plans, employers and government agencies. Alere Medical is dedicated to developing better educated, motivated and self-enabled healthcare consumers and supporting clinicians in managing the care of their patients. Alere Medical delivers programs that address wellness, healthy living, productivity improvement and navigation of the healthcare system, and provides case management of acute and catastrophic conditions. Headquartered in Marietta, Alere Medical operates through nearly 50 offices around the United States.

Challenge:

Over the years, a series of acquisitions and growth strategies required the company to bring disparate entities together – not only from a business perspective, but also a technical one.

In 2007, Jay Scott, a Performance Engineer at Alere, realized that the existing network monitoring solution he had been chartered to implement lacked the fundamental capabilities he deemed necessary to meet the company’s long-term needs. He recognized the need for a high-availability solution that was also disaster-recovery sensitive and had the speed and versatility the company required at an affordable price point. During this time, a representative from SevOne contacted Scott and asked him to consider the company’s next-generation enterprise management tools and services.

“SevOne hit at the right time,” Scott says. “For the most part they could meet my needs out-of-the-box and where there were gaps they worked diligently to develop custom features as part of a proof of concept – something that was not an option with our previously installed system vendor.”

According to Scott, one of the things he needed to complete his vision for a useful network management solution was forward-projecting capacity management capabilities that reported into his existing management interface. These capabilities would allow Scott and his team to leverage historical data to identify where an enterprise’s problems existed at that moment in time and to plan lead times well in advance of an actual event.

“While it wasn’t something that was available in their original product, SevOne worked with us and delivered on that feature set, just as they said they would,” Scott says.

The addition of the SevOne PAS has resulted in Scott being able to technically as well as geographically integrate alerting thresholds in association with or complementing IP SLA Cisco, as well as NetFlow.

“Our meshed configuration allows me to set up alerting throughout the network,” Scott says. “For example, I can do a page pull from our Phoenix office to a server here in Marietta and I can do the same for Chicago, Fort Lauderdale and so on – monitor those responses, set up alert thresholds around them and I can tell immediately if I have a geographic problem, as opposed to a location-specific problem.”

SevOne also met the requirements for a high availability solution with robust disaster recovery capabilities.

“One of the things we were able to do with SevOne is produce a fully meshed network,” explains Scott. “We have two SevOne appliances here in Marietta and two in our data center in Chicago. Each unit provides redundant back-up capability to the other so that in the event of a failure of hardware or circuitry within a location, we don’t lose visibility.”

The SevOne interface provides the ability to log onto any one of the four appliances at any point in time: any of the data you need, if it’s collected by at least one of the other units it’s reportable from the device you’re accessing,” Scott adds. “For my incumbent vendor, doing it that way was an administrative headache.”

Results:

Mitigating administration time with the SevOne solution has not only saved time, but also has substantially increased overall productivity at Alere.

“SevOne’s auto discovery feature goes out and discovers devices for me,” Scott says. “Once a night my system goes out and picks up anything new from interfaces to processes and automatically adds them for me to the devices I monitor. My current vendor at the time would have taken days for the base install, much less completing the discovery process. That’s a lot of administration that’s removed for me.”

As an outcome of the auto discovery process, group administration and group management has become more accurate and streamlined. When he is adding new rules and policies, for example, Scott is assured that he is applying them to the appropriate group for reporting purposes – something that was nearly impossible with the former system.

An even more critical benchmark for Scott – in order to keep on top and ahead of network problems – was the speed of reporting. Neither latency nor downtime was an outcome Scott could afford with any regularity.

“One of the things I do is run a 30-page capacity report every month that looks at our WAN circuits, our LAN connectivity to servers, our CPU usage on devices, drive space, and related metrics and I then run that report against all of my LAN or WAN interfaces, some 8,000 elements in all,” Scott says. “With my incumbent vendor I could schedule that report to begin running at midnight and I’d have to hope it would be completed by the time I arrived the next morning. With SevOne I can schedule that report and might have to wait 10-15 minutes to achieve that same result.”

The SevOne solution also saves time by giving Scott and his IT team a holistic view of the entire network so they can generate server condition reports quickly whenever they need them. “All we have to do is type in the device we want to check and get a quick report on CPU utilization, memory drives, traffic patterns, and more,” Scott says. “Instead of having to run multiple reports to find what you need, with SevOne it’s a couple of clicks and you’re where you need to be.”

A final outcome Scott is weighing, particularly as compliance-based initiatives become more a fact of life for both the business and his IT staff, is how to best leverage SevOne information to support Alere’s observance of industry-specific regulations such as HIPAA.

“While we’re not collecting configuration information, SevOne does maintain our historical data,” Scott says. “For example, the way the appliance is sized – say it’s for 10,000 elements – it will maintain one year ‘as-polled’ data for that number of elements in a standard poll cycle. For competing monitoring and application performance monitoring solutions even a 60-day rolled-up ‘as-polled’ data, over time, goes away. With SevOne I can go back six months or longer and still have the data I need to validate our level of compliance.”

While Scott wrestled with having to buy both the network performance management software as well as the hardware to run it on through his incumbent vendor, the choice to move forward with SevOne proved a far easier decision. No hardware was required and there was no cost to “add-in” modules. The one-stop shopping was not the only reason Scott chose SevOne to augment his in-house network management solution.

When he evaluated the SevOne estimate, he discovered that Alere Medical was getting the ability to monitor 20,000 elements versus 4,000 elements from its incumbent vendor for half as much investment.

“I estimate my savings alone projected over the next three years to be significant and we won’t need to spend additional capital on hardware to run the software on,” Scott says. “Additionally, SevOne saves me more than 50 percent of the administration costs that my incumbent vendor would have required and I assure you that percentage is decidedly conservative.”

Taking everything into consideration – the rich features, the price points and the solution’s versatility – what impressed Scott the most actually occurred at the point of SevOne’s inception.

“We built the proof of concept and they ported all the data over to the production system,” Scott says. “At that point we launched out of proof of concept straight into production. We haven’t second-guessed ourselves since.”

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SevOne provides the world’s largest CSPs, MSPs and Enterprises with the most comprehensive technology portfolio to collect, analyze and visualize network & infrastructure performance data to deliver actionable insights to compete and win in the connected world.